Ultimate Prizes (36 page)

“I understand. Now, can you look back and pinpoint the moment when the restlessness began? Was it around the time in 1938 when your mother came to live with you?”

“Oh no!” I said at once, relieved that I could at last speak with confidence and look him straight in the eye. “That disaster actually united us. No, the marriage only started to get awkward after our fifth child was born in March 1941. We’d only—” I bit back the word “planned” on the grounds that it might upset an Anglo-Catholic. “We’d only hoped for four children. The fifth wasn’t entirely a welcome surprise.”

“So the restlessness began after March 1941. Directly after?”

“No.” Again I could speak with confidence. “Newborn babies aren’t usually much trouble. They just sleep most of the time. Sandy didn’t start to wear Grace out until he was six months old, sitting up and demanding constant attention, and it was when she was worn out that I became aware of feeling restless.”

“That takes us to the September of 1941, doesn’t it? And in the September of 1941, you said earlier—”

“My mother died. Yes,” I said. “That’s when it all began, I can see that clearly now. Grace told me she was too exhausted to go to the funeral, she couldn’t bear to leave Sandy, didn’t want to take advantage of her best friend’s offer to look after him—and so on and so on. I remember looking at her and thinking: I don’t need a dull dreary wife like you any more. That horrified me, of course, because it was such a terrible judgement, so unfair, in fact quite unacceptable. Grace was so perfect, you see—”

“Such a prize.”

“Yes, such a prize, and prizes have to be perfect because if they’re not perfect they wouldn’t be prizes any more. So long as Grace was a prize I could feel happy and secure, but once she ceased to be a prize—”

“You didn’t want her.”

“But I did! I adored her and she adored me and we had this perfect marriage—”

“No, that’s not quite right, is it, Neville? That was the drama you were playing on stage. But reality—as indeed you admitted a moment ago—lay elsewhere.”

“Well, of course I’m not denying there was a little awkwardness—”

“No, Neville. That’s not quite right either, is it? I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down off that stage. This was no ‘little awkwardness.’ You fell in love with another woman, didn’t you, when your wife was still alive.”

“Well, yes, but nothing happened! I fought against the attraction! I concede that I was in love with Dido, but I swear there was no impropriety!”

“No, that’s not quite right either, Neville, is it? I’m sorry, but we really do have to face this other drama that was taking place off stage. If you fell in love with another woman while your wife was still alive, there was impropriety.”

“But all I did was clasp her hands once and tell her I felt as if spring had arrived after a long dull winter! All right, I know that was idiotic, but—”

“It was wrong.”

“But it was only a little slip!”

“It was a sin.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I did my best to be good and decent—”

“You mean you went through the motions of being good and decent. But the truth was, wasn’t it, that you were harbouring adulterous thoughts and wished that you could have carnal knowledge of this woman within the only context available to you as a priest: marriage. And this desire in turn must mean, mustn’t it, that there were times when consciously or unconsciously you wished you were a widower—”

“That’s a monstrous accusation!”

“You mean it’s painful. Yes. Sin always is.”

“But I didn’t do anything, I didn’t hurt anyone—”

“No? Are you telling me your wife died in ignorance of your so-called ‘little slip’?”

I said: “I’ll not talk about this. I refuse to discuss this any more. I won’t discuss it, I won’t, I absolutely refuse—”

“No, it’s much, much too painful, isn’t it? It’s a torment. It’s a nightmare. But Neville, in the end you’ve got to screw up all your courage and face this pain. The road to repentance doesn’t lie, you see, in ringing down the curtain on the sin you can’t bear to face.”

I lost control of myself. Springing to my feet, I shouted in fury: “My repentance is between me and God! I don’t have to approach God through a clergyman—through a
priest
—like you! I’m a Protestant, not a bloody Catholic, and I’ll not tolerate any manifestation of Catholicism—no confessionals,
no celibate priests playing God
,
NO DAMNED MONKS TALKING DAMNED RUBBISH
—NO BLOODY POPERY, NOT IN MY LIFE, NOT NOW, NOT EVER!”

During this chaotic speech I had broken down, blundering from the table and slumping onto the bed, but I knew that this time there could be no running away; I was far beyond an escape which could have been achieved by rushing out of a room. I had no clear idea at first why I had sunk into emotional disintegration. All I knew was that the wasteland had suddenly become pitch dark. I covered my face with my hands as if I could protect myself from the horror I could not name, but as the tears streamed past my fingers I realised what had happened. I had been almost annihilated by the pain I had just faced. I thought of my Grace, that innocent victim who had been so wounded by my infidelity that she had been drained of the will to live, and at last the river of guilt which I had suppressed for so long burst its banks. In the flood that followed, Christ was absent, God had turned away His face, and I felt I could only drown in my grief and my shame.

Then someone sat down on the bed beside me; someone stepped into my wasteland to share my agony; someone made the darkness endurable. Automatically I reached out for his hand. It was there, waiting, and as his fingers closed on mine I knew that Christ, the resurrected Christ, not the Jesus of history but the Christ of Eternity, had moved through the closed door of the room to be again at one with his disciples. He was contained in the compassion which now encircled me and in the sharing of the suffering. My tears ceased. My pain eased. A great stillness seemed to blend with the silence.

After a long while I said: “I’m so frightened of failing, and sin means failure. But I won’t be Going Under, will I, if I now call my mistakes sins?”

“No, Neville, you won’t be Going Under. You’ll be Getting On.”

“And the prize I have to win now isn’t merely survival, is it? It’s the new life where I’m finally set free to serve God instead of myself.”

“That’s it. That’s when you’ll be Going Far.”

After an even longer while I said: “I’m not much of a clergyman. My sermons tend to resemble legal arguments. I’m awkward at pastoral work. I try to avoid the poor. I think too much about cultivating the people who matter. In fact although I’m so successful I’m really rather a failure. That’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

“If you pursue the truth far enough you always wind up in the land of paradox. You reach a point where the apparent truth divides into two opposing truths, and then you have to try to reach beyond them to grasp the ultimate truth, their synthesis.”

“Raven doesn’t approve of that type of Hegelian dialectic. He sees all truth as a unity.”

“Hegel’s synthesis could be Raven’s unity. Who knows? Most ultimate truths lie beyond words altogether.”

“That, I know, is how Catholics justify their use of elaborate ritual.” I blew my nose before saying: “Sorry about all the Protestant bigotry. Disgusting. Don’t usually behave like one of Cromwell’s statue-bashers.”

Lucas said with a wry, dry humour which I could immediately appreciate: “That’s all right, lad, we’re all bigots here. Cuthbert Darcy used to refer to the Church of Rome as ‘Our Fallen Sister.’ ” Releasing my hand, he rose to his feet. “Sometimes I think the Church of England’s little short of a miracle,” he said idly. “Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals, the whole range of worshippers between the two extremes—it’s a wonder we all coexist as we do.”

“We manage it because fundamentally we’re a unity.”

“But couldn’t one equally well say we manage it because we’re a disunity, Catholics and Protestants opposing each other in a continuing dialectic which results in the synthesis of the Church?” He allowed me no time to reply but merely added over his shoulder as he moved to the door: “I’ll be back at half-past five. If you need help at any hour of the night, knock on Peter’s door—number ten at the top of the stairs—and he’ll fetch me.”

“I’ll be all right now.”

“Yes, I believe you will. Good night, Neville. God bless you.”

He left, the wily old fox padding back to his lair to recuperate from his latest adventure in the tangled spiritual thickets which beset his territory, and I was left exhausted but not without hope on the cross of my guilt and my pain.

4

The guest-master woke me at five and returned with tea ten minutes later to make sure I had kept my eyes open. By the time Lucas arrived I was fully dressed in my clerical suit and reading the office. This semblance of normality pleased him. “Maintaining a familiar routine is important,” he said. “Comfort as well as strength can be derived from such discipline … Did you sleep at all?”

“Not much. I hope you did. I felt worried afterwards that I might have tired you, so soon after your operation.”

“If I could still be classed as an invalid I wouldn’t be going home today.” He smiled as he sat down opposite me at the table. “Now let’s start thinking about you again. First of all I’m going to explain what I believe is going on—but let me stress that you’re under no obligation to agree with a single word I say. I venture an opinion not because I want to impose a theory on you but because I want to help you understand the suggestions I shall be making about the future. Since these suggestions spring from my interpretation of your crisis I can hardly expect you to understand them until you first grasp the essence of my interpretation.”

“I understand. But of course I’m very anxious to hear your theory and I promise I won’t go storming out if I don’t like it.”

“Splendid, but let me now help you keep calm by begging you not to take what I say too literally. Great difficulties arise when one tries to express complex truths in words, and although there may be several valid ways of describing what’s happened to you, none of them will be exact because we’re not dealing with a mathematical equation. Father Ingram, the Abbot-General, who’s twelve years younger than I am and very much cleverer, would talk the language of modern psychology. Jon Darrow, who’s also twelve years younger than I am and far more heavily endowed with psychic powers, would probably use the ancient symbolic language of mysticism. I’m just an ordinary old dog who doesn’t know any fancy tricks, so I shall fall back on the commonplace literary device of the metaphor, which we successfully employed yesterday when we talked of your personality as if it were a trio of people, the three Nevilles. Now, so long as we remember that we’re using a method which is an inexact way of describing a complex truth, I don’t think we’ll go too far astray. The biggest danger about techniques which employ metaphor, symbolism and analogy is that sometimes people mistake these devices for hard facts and get tied up in knots.”

“I understand. You’ll be painting an impressionist picture, not taking a photograph, so I mustn’t get upset if some details are missing or distorted.”

“Precisely. In fact only God is in a position to take a photograph because only God can ever know the whole truth about any human being and the circumstances surrounding his life. But what I can do here is to illuminate what we do know in such a way that what we don’t know becomes more sharply defined. Then once we grasp what we don’t know you’ll be in a better position to reach beyond the paradox to the ultimate truth which is hidden from us.” He smiled before adding: “And there you see how words break down under the strain of expressing complex matters! I’m not saying that you’ll ever know the whole truth, which is God’s truth. I’m saying that you may have a good chance of grasping that part of the truth which God has made available for you to know.”

“The truth which should be accessible but which I’m at present too muddled to discern?”

“That’s it. Now—” The old boy leant back in his chair, removed his spectacles and began to polish them on the skirt of his habit. His casual, relaxed manner was very soothing. “Let me tell you what I think has happened. For the first seven years of your life—very important years, as any Jesuit will tell you—you were Neville One, living in a benign world dominated by two loving adults, your father and your nurse Tabitha. This was an excellent start in life, although it might be worth noting that from infancy you would have been aware of two contrasting types of women, the simple motherly soul and the remote complex blue-stocking.

“Then your father died, Tabitha disappeared, your mother became even more remote and your uncle made it plain that if you wanted to survive you had to become just like him; in other words, Neville Two had to reject his father. This you did most successfully, but as you grew up, Neville One, who had never quite died but had merely been locked up, began to rattle the bars of his prison. You became very tired of Uncle Willoughby. Like most young men you wanted to assert yourself and become independent of those who had authority over you, so when you heard Professor Raven declaring: ‘It’s all a unity! It’s all one!’ it was hardly surprising that Neville One was spurred to break out of jail. And once he was free you were able to re-establish your loyalty to your father, whom you saw as a profoundly religious man.

“Now it’s Neville Two’s turn to be locked up, but after a while you find you can’t live without him after all. He’s the one who knows how to survive and flourish. He can’t be consigned to prison, but how is he going to run in harness with Neville One when they’re so incompatible? This is a very difficult problem, but you solve it by binding the two Nevilles together and enfolding them in a new identity. They’re still separate—a merger is impossible because of the acute dissimilarity—but at least they’re contained harmoniously within Neville Three, who’s emerged into the world to keep them trotting smoothly in tandem.

“The arrival on the scene of Neville Three has a most unexpected result. Your mother, who’s been very much on the fringe of your life all these years, now discovers that this new Neville is irresistible, a miraculous manifestation of her husband
and
her brother, those two gentlemen who were so dissimilar that it would have seemed to her impossible that they could ever be combined in one person. You’ve got rid of Uncle Willoughby by this time, but nature abhors a vacuum; you’ve always had a focal point in your emotional life, and even now you’re a grown man you find you still need this powerful presence, the audience which can be guaranteed to applaud your dazzling performance whenever you step on stage.